


White as Snow

by Pandora



Category: Fairy Tales and Related Fandoms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-28 01:44:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/302361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pandora/pseuds/Pandora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She sleeps in the middle of the forest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	White as Snow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stillskies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillskies/gifts).



The house where I grew up is in  
the middle, the end, of the forest, the  
towering pines and shaggy bear  
spruces that crowded only feet away. I  
could say it was hidden, invisible until  
you saw the skygleam of the  
windows. The creek went through  
my grandmother’s garden, small  
and slippery with melted  
snow. I’ve touched the water and  
it was too cold to feel. The trees  
shook and writhed their needles and  
shed them in heaps into the  
hunting and gathering path. The one  
I had been told for years (by my grandmother, or  
my aunt locked in her black  
nightsky dress) never to use.

I had always lived with them. My mother  
died (conveniently and

romantically) in childbirth. Her heart fluttered and  
squirmed and broke itself like a  
bird. Of course I don’t, I can’t, remember  
her. I know that I don’t look like  
her portrait, with her spilled black as ink  
hair, her tiny porcelain doll’s feet. Though my  
hair is dark enough, it is a long  
squirming, tangled mess I have to fight to  
brush out. I’ve dreamt that mice and rubypin lady  
bugs crawl in and out of it.

My grandmother cut it short. My aunt watched  
as I ran down the camp road, panting, or maybe  
maybe yelling. The trees creaked like old  
doors in the wind.

\--

My aunt would walk into the woods once, or  
more, every week. I would go to the  
window, away from my fever-flushed sheets, or  
the novel I was reading on the parlour  
couch, to see her dress blur into the shadows. People  
did think (though never aloud, oh dear me  
no) she was odd, _a bit queer_. And no, I don’t  
know why she never married. She would  
disappear, while I could only watch, and  
later, hours later, the door clicked behind her  
as she came in. She went to the kitchen stove, or  
sat back down to her sewing, knitting sticks  
stabbed through her heap of hair. She gave  
me a tiny, locked diary smile.

\--

When I was sixteen, she gave me a  
key, the key with a bird’s head with mirror  
shard teeth. She let me hold it for a moment, while  
the trees spilled their cold shadows on  
the ground

( _It is time_ , the queen told her ward, in a deer-  
thud voice, _for you to know the truth_.)

\--

Of course, I had gone down the path, even  
before my grandmother allowed it, in the shadows  
or the dust-glitter sunlight. And I had  
seen her. Most of the local children  
have, with nervous giggling-whispers. Her coffin, a  
white boat with glass walls, stands out. She  
wasn’t, isn’t, dead. But I did not see  
her chest shiver as she breathed, either. Her  
eyelids twitched once in a dream. She lies in  
her long, autumn leaf hair and her  
rotting white rose silk dress, and her  
mouth has stopped in a smile. She must be  
a princess, because the coffin is set with  
gleaming, animal-glare rubies, and it  
is lined with white snow velvet. There is  
a small, teardrop keyhole on the side.

That one time, I touched the glass, smeared with  
nervous, hopeful fingerprints, from little  
boys and local crones. But she did not move. She  
couldn’t hear the tiny, treebranch tap I had made. She  
didn’t even start to breathe.

\--

The key slid into place in the hole. But I couldn’t  
move it, and turn the lock with it. Oh (I would  
say if anyone asked) I tried. The coffin lid  
glowed with my looming reflection. But she only  
lay there and smiled, slightly, dreaming, the  
plump gag of her tongue still, forever, for hundreds  
of years, in its place.

 _She opened her eyes in her dream at the man who  
kissed her_.

 _She could hardly see him as her heart rolled over—_

\--

That man--a prince, lost from his hunting party in  
the tall crowds of trees--might, some-  
day, find her, and smash the glass into creek  
water. She can’t know that, but I do. But I could  
only stand there. My reflection stared, my  
hair a mess of melting watercolor. When I touched  
the lid, it began (I can only imagine) to  
snow inside her dream.


End file.
